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For millions of complicated reasons and a few simpler ones, Gov. Tom Wolf decided Tuesday to let voters remain in suspense a little longer about who they might get to vote into Congress.

The millions of complicated reasons the Democratic governor rejected a Republican-led rewrite of the state’s congressional district boundaries came from an expert named Moon Duchin.

A respected mathematics professor at Tufts University in Boston, Duchin dabbles in writing congressional district maps on the side.

Which district a voter lives in determines which candidates they see on election ballots.

Using computer-based formulas that mathematicians know as algorithms, Duchin said she found millions of alternative congressional redistricting plans fairer to Democrats than the one state House and Senate Republican leaders released last Friday.

“I concluded that the proposed (Republican) plan’s bias in favor of Republicans is extremely unlikely to have come about by chance,” Duchin wrote in a statement Wolf’s office released to accompany the governor’s rejection of the Republican leaders’ plan.

In fact, the chance was no more than 1 in 1,000 that a map meant to comply with a state Supreme Court order to rewrite congressional districts would turn out the way the new Republican one did, she determined. The Supreme Court, which ruled the current congressional district map unconstitutional last month, wanted a map with several traits. The court wanted compact districts that share common borders, have roughly equal populations and do not split up counties, cities, boroughs or townships “except where necessary to ensure equality of population.”

The Republicans said they did that. Their new map’s congressional districts are more compact, share common borders, differ in population by no more than one person and split up far fewer towns and counties than the existing map.

The trouble is, Wolf said, the Republican map still does the one thing the Supreme Court said not to do because of the state constitution’s requirement of free and equal elections — it favors one political party.

“Only the 2011 (redistricting) plan that is currently in effect started from a more severe partisan skew and stood out more in this test,” Duchin concluded.

In other words, Republicans did it again.

Wolf also brought up simpler reasons for his rejection of the map.

A Senate Republican lawyer said they did not write the new map to reflect voting trends, but Wolf cited Duchin and several other analysts who found that is exactly what the Republicans did.

In redistricting, voter trends always matter because any political party wants voters moving its way. In this day and age, when people feel less loyal to their registered political party affiliation, this matters more than how many Republicans and how many Democrats live in a district.

For example, the 11th Congressional District — which Republican U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta represents — has about the same number of Republicans and Democrats, but President Donald Trump, a Republican, won the district by more than 2 to 1 over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Under the existing map, Trump won 12 of the state’s 18 congressional districts, Clinton, six. Under the new Republican map, Trump won 12 — albeit a slightly different 12 — Clinton, six.

And, not only did Trump win 12 districts, the vote percentages for him and Clinton were remarkably similar in all 18 districts under both maps.

Take the three local congressional districts. These numbers come from analyses by Brian Amos, a University of Florida Ph.D.-candidate who concentrates on redistricting, and Daily Kos, a liberal-leaning website:

Out of the millions of new, less-biased district maps that Duchin says Republicans could have come up with, they came up with one that doesn’t look like the one that exists now, but reflects almost the same voting trends.

“Their map clearly seeks to benefit one political party, which is the essence of why the court found the current map to be unconstitutional,” Wolf said, which is why he rejected it.

Contact the writer:

bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com, 570-348-9147

@BorysBlogTT

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